So Much Depends Upon a Red Bicycle
by Nyah
Summary: Time Wars, Timelords, Timey-Whimey Christmas. And that Red Bicycle. Doctor/Rose


Disclaimer: Do I look like the BBC? Title winked from Williams.

Timeline: Timey-Wimeyness abounds.

**So Much Depends Upon a Red Bicycle**

The snow is ankle deep and, and far as he's concerned, more properly called sludge. It lies in dark puddles on the street ahead, chunky and thick like the pavement is losing shape under the weight of holiday traffic. Fresh flakes fall, white, from a dark, glutinous sky, alighting on his face which is neither turned up in wonder nor turned away from the chill.

He thinks he could climb through the thickness of the air, through the inky spools of this Christmas Eve. And with the thought his mind rises, ancient and voluminous, to watch from above the newly born man sitting on a bench, the man's who's done nothing yet but wish to wake up in some other world. But the world he wants is one his eyes have never seen, grass like blood, glistening crystal towers, knowledge and philosophy and life …. And all of it lost to science, lost to history, lost to all memory except his.

He sighs and watches his breath bleed into the winter wind where it picks up city grit and snowflakes and a stray shopping bag. It carries away a child's voice and the sound of a car engine. It's a wind that's suited to barren moorlands, he thinks, to bleak gothic landscapes. He watches the wind as it twists past shops and into gray alleys, as it blows over parked cars and chills passersby.

And then, quite suddenly, his vision is interrupted by a rude pair of legs. "Do you mind?" Asks the woman attached to the legs.

When he shakes his head and she takes a seat on the bench. He barks a harsh laugh built less on humor than cold air. "What's funny?" She asks, more concerned than she ought to be.

"Leave it to a human," he says. "Two whole races vanish and not a one of you notices. But an empty seat in the middle of a bloody snowstorm? Spotted that a mile off, didn't you?"

She's quiet but she doesn't move off the way he'd expect a woman faced with a mad man to do. So finally he glances up from the rude pair of legs to get a look at the woman with the mile-long stare. It's the colors that startle him, pink cheeks and yellow hair and knitted mittens. Her coat is red wool, her rude legs, blue with denim. Somehow, he realizes, he'd thought colors died with Gallifrey.

"There are places you haven't seen yet," she says calmly and the wind steals his breath away. "People you haven't met."

He shakes his head, trying to clear a path for a thought through the jumble and chaos. He had exhausted his store of confusion so his voice came out trailing anger. "Who are you then? Someone I'll meet along the way? Someone else who'll want something from me? I've given it all away already, burnt it all up!" After nine hundred years of phone box travel he knows the universe doesn't send signs or omens or hope but time can be bent to make it seem that way.

He looks at the woman beside him on the bench, at the red of her coat and he knows someone's been meddling.

"Who are you then? What are you about?" He can already hear the resignation in his own voice. He's too tired for anger. "Come to set my penance? Tell me, Miss Red," he says, plucking the sleeve of her coat, "what's the penalty for stopping an entire world from ever existing? Shall I clap the erasers and write, 'I'm so sorry' in chalk for the rest of eternity?"

"Oi!" she says. "I forgot how much you could talk this time around."

He can feel the look of horror on his face as she tries not to laugh. "Sorry," she says, sobering. "Sorry. It's just … you can't stay like this. There's too much to do."

"You've said that."

"You know I can't tell you more," she smiles in sympathy over rules he himself probably made. She stands abruptly on her rude legs, her meddling coat brushing against his knees. Hands in bright mittens reach for him, making as if to pull him to his feet. But then she frowns, all pink lips and brown eyes that look past him in a mile-long stare.

So he stands up on his own, too sad now to bear it in anyone else. "Where to then?"

"Anywhere," she says, forcing a grin that's real when it hits her eyes. "That's the point!"

So they walk down the streets, through the slush and past the shops. And somehow his eyes are full of London and color and Christmas. He blinks. Maybe his visions is better this time around. Maybe the world is sharper than he remembers.

You were a traveler once," she says, by his side, her arm bumping softly against his. "Before the war. You went all sorts of places, had adventures..."

"So that's it then? I should just go on like nothing's changed." And he knows that in all the ways that count to most of the universe, nothing has changed. Gallifrey's gone and no one's noticed.

"No," she says quietly, so quietly. Like … almost like she might, sort of, nearly understand. Just the edge of it. Just the shadow of everything he's going through. She might understand.

"But there's so much out there," she stops right in the middle of the sidewalk and turns her mile-long stare on the sky. She looks up with wide eyes like she can see through the clouds and the haze of city light. "There's everything. Planets and stars, spaceships. There's whole cities living and dying and …. Well, most people will never know, yeah? Most people will never get beyond their little corner of the universe."

"It's a tragedy, yeah," he says drily, not in the mood for airy speeches or pretty platitudes. He turns, away from her, down the next street.

"No!" She's angry now. "It deserves better than that. We all deserve better than that. Most of us never get to see any other pieces but if there's someone out there who can see them all, see everything, all of of time and space? You know all the big important things and even the boring bits in between, all the moon landings and treaties and the big rock concerts and the times your mum ruined tea. If someone could see all of it and know all of it and … still love all of it. Then … then he has to do it. You have to do it."

She's standing on the corner, shouting at him in the dark. There are icicles dripping on the streetlamp behind her and snow melting in her hair. Her breath steams angrily into the night.

"I'm not him," he says, stepping too close to her, too close to this living, breathing, breakable girl. "Whoever it is you meet meet in the future, I'm not him."

"Not yet," she agrees. "He's braver than you and kinder. He wants to see every planet and touch everything he's not supposed to and know … know it all!"

He can see what she's not saying in the pink of her cheeks. "He's more like you, isn't he? It's you he wants to show the universe? He's in love with you?"

"He … well I …." That's done it. For the first time she's at a loss, shaken out of the certainty of a future she's already lived.

"I suppose you have some idea of what you're doing," he says, taking her hand. "Popping in for a jaunt in my past, changing my life."

"Learned from the best," she agrees, pulled a bit off her feet as she lags behind.

"So it turns out, does it? This man I become, this traveller who turns up here and there and meddles, sees everything, meets everyone …."

"Makes things better."

It's his turn to stop short. "Not in the god business, me."

"Not like that!" She says with a horror he finds comforting. "Just … see that little girl?"

Across the street is a girl walking sullenly behind her mother, kicking at the slush. As he watches, she wipes away tears before huddling once again against the cold. "You see that girl and …."

"I want to make her smile." He surprises himself.

"How?"

He looks down at her triumphant pink cheeks, her red, meddling coat. "Red bicycle," he says. "Under the Christmas tree. Maybe a trip tot he Horsehead Nubula first, she'll think it was a dream."

"That's the idea," she says, smile shaky. "There's a shop over there that sells bicycles." She squeezes his hand and points around the corner.

When he turns back around, she walking backward the way they came. She waves a mittened hand.

"I'll see you again," he says.

"Go on then," she urges.

And he does.

Back near the empty bench, Rose walks a few paces through the snow, around a corner, down an alley. There, parked next to her war-wounded sister-self, is the TARDIS. The door opens like magic and her approach and warm light spills onto the fresh snow.

"I was very unkind to you," says the boyish Doctor, looking at her from behind guilty brows and a cranberry colored bow tie.

"You were a bit of a prick before you met me, weren't you?"

"Bit of a mess, really," he replies.

"I'd never seen you so happy before," she says. "As the time you told me about the red bicycle."

"Everybody lived," he says, remembering. And she can see it there in his eyes. 'Radiance,' you might call it, the way he was grinning upon saving the children of London. But 'radiance' seems sort of rich, sort of elegant. And there's something almost embarrassing, something wholly unrefined about his joy. Like he's taken too large a helping, an extra slice and the host has raised an eyebrow.

Just then Amy turns the corner, clutching a heavy bag. "Every five days," she mutters.

"Out of milk?" Rose asks, laughing as she steps into the TARDIS.

"Every five days!" Amy says again, following.

"Come on, Doctor!" Rose shouts from within. "We've got a few more stops yet or you'll turn out to be a crotchety old badger by the time we meet!"

"One more day with the person I love," he says to the falling snow. " Six impossible things to do before breakfast. That's Rose Tyler."


End file.
